What Is Enhanced Ecommerce

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What Is Enhanced Ecommerce

Convert has covered a lot of strategies and tools for positively affecting your customers’ behavior and getting them through to the conversion you want. A/B testing goes a long way to refining some of these techniques and picking out the most effective ones, but you might still be at a loss for monitoring the behaviors of your customers while they’re engaging with your site. In a brick and mortar shop it’s easy to know how many people are in your store, what items they’re looking at, and to judge the hesitations that come up right before they give you their money. How do you figure all of that out in a website though?

Before 2014, Google Analytics offered some information about web traffic and user experiences, but many e-business owners were in agreement with Conversion Works co-founder Russell Sutton who called analytics ecommerce reports, “lackluster” in a recent webinar. However, Google has since rolled out the more advanced Enhanced Ecommerce feature as a part of their Analytics Platform.

In this excerpt, Convert shares some of the insights Russell presented in a webinar he hosted last CROday. Russell walked listeners through all the new information that this addition offers and the three main areas where it can help you to understand your customers like never before thanks to its easy to read reports. These are the three things Enhanced Ecommerce can help you see in new, clearer ways to help your business.

User Journey

The first big thing that Enhanced Ecommerce will help give you insight into is your user’s basic experience of your site. Many analytics and metrics will give you total dollar amounts broken down in a few ways, but too often these focus simply on the bottom line. The bottom line is important, of course, but how can you ever improve if you don’t know how people are interacting with your business?

Users arrive at your site and click through to a few different pages before either completing your call to action, making a purchase, or leaving altogether. It’s impossible to ask every single visitor why they left or why they followed through, but with Enhanced Ecommerce reports, you can get a pretty good idea of at least where they went while they were in the shop. The reports themselves are geared to making it easy to see exactly when and where they abandoned making the purchase or completing a call to action.

This information is crucial when analyzing the end of a customer’s journey: the check-out process. This process can be broken down into three easy steps:

Details

Delivery

Payment

All users should be following the same trajectory of handing over this information in order to have a successful transaction. Enhanced Ecommerce makes it a click away to see where your customers’ journey becomes difficult–simply click on a different option to get the exact numbers of people that abandon on the details page, the delivery info page, or the payment page. A large number of people abruptly ending at delivery could point to a severe problem with your interface that’s making it too difficult for people to complete the transaction. Enhanced Ecommerce gives you solid proof to show that the website needs to be changed to make that part of the journey easier.

Product Comparisons

Enhanced Ecommerce reports don’t just make timelines easy to understand. They can also be quickly changed to show user behavior regarding your products. In a few clicks, reports can be generated that easily compare the way consumers are interacting with the different options your site offers. If you have rival products, Coke and Pepsi for example, reports can be generated that show you not just how many are purchased, but whether people looked at one, or even added it to their cart first, before deciding on the other.

By developing a story around your normal user, you can start to create ideas of what’s driving their behavior. If people are coming to your site, looking at Pepsi first, but then buying Coke, you can start looking at what makes these products different. Enhanced Ecommerce makes zeroing in on products and how they affect behavior easy with look to buy ratios: is Coke such a great product that almost everyone who looks at it wants to buy it? Is it simply cheaper than Pepsi right now? These reports can give you crucial empirical evidence to answer these questions.

Environment

Are there products wherein every time they’re looked at, they are purchased? As an answer, Russell explains:

“If I can start to find those golden nuggets, a really really high probability of being purchased, I’m gonna do something about it. I’m going to make them more prominent. I’m going to put them on the homepage. I’m going to make them far more visible. So this is absolutely crucial.”

Let’s say you discover that one product seems to always sell when people look at at it. In a brick and mortar supermarket or shop, you’d want to put that product up wherever possible–have it at the end of every aisle, right? In a store, it’s easy to see where people are noticing hot items because they’ll be going off the shelves faster. But in a website, how do you know if your attempts at special offers with pop-ups, banners, or content is really drawing people toward your most popular items?

You guessed it: Enhanced Ecommerce can track this as well. Easy lists of data make it apparent where your items are getting looked at and then purchased the most. Products can be listed by their location on your site in addition to comparisons and user behavior. Do you have an environment on your site that lists your “cheapest” or “best selling” items? Is it really working? Enhanced Ecommerce reports could hold the answer. ,

Enhanced Ecommerce might seem like the solution to all your problems with conversion and strategizing for improving your site. It does present a massive improvement on analytics that were previously offered, but like so many other things, you have to know how to use it. Now that you know the potential, we’ll be walking you through the specifics in future posts to help you get your ecommerce as enhanced as possible. If you want to know more about the webinar, you can watch it full here.

Rhett Morgan is a freelance writer, translator, and content developer based out of Austin, TX.

We have brought thought leaders, influencers, visionaries and veterans to our tribe. Now it’s your turn. If you have something worthwhile to share with a large community of savvy testers, go ahead and pitch your post idea. We’re listening.